Top 10 - 2015

This is the latest I have made a Top 10 list since I began this blog in 2010. As I outlined in a past post, the reason is that I’ve been waiting to see significant 2015 titles that I either missed or that never came to my area, and I didn’t want to compose my list without being able to consider such notable (and obnoxiously late) releases such as Anomalisa and Son of Saul, or streamables available on Netflix and elsewhere. My plan, it turns out, proved to be only partially useful: as of this writing, the second film was only released here last week, and the first is still absent from any theater near me. I suppose it’s my fault for missing them when they were at CIFF back in October…

But something else has delayed my list, something I also made note of in my prior post. It’s that 2015 felt like kind of a bizarre movie year, the rare one in which no single film stood out as a head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest favorite. In other words, you can essentially consider all ten excellent films on my list as equal top-rankers.

One theme emerged, however: cinema. Many of the 2015 films that most spoke to me were the ones that took cinema history and theory as their driving creative forces, building experiences that exploited the material and psychological faculties of the medium. These films were conceptually audacious, aestheticaly indelible, and wonderfully exciting in their understanding, and practicing of, film's boundless formal and narrative potentials.

2015 films of note I still, regrettably, have not seen: In Jackson Heights, Queen of Earth, Anomalisa, Mustang, Joy, Chi-Raq, Arabian Nights, Victoria

TOP 10 AFTER THE JUMP!

10. Room / Lenny Abrahamson

Committing to the screen one of the more authentic child’s-eye views in recent memory, Room evocatively inhabits both the physical and psychological perspectives of an inchoate youth. The film accomplishes this through an impressive concert of camerawork, editing, sound, and performance: centered invariably on the amazing Jacob Tremblay, Abrahamson defines time and space through his eyes by nimbly calibrating these filmmaking tools around him, placing us in point-of-view shots that let us viscerally feel his literally expanding worldview. Trepidation, wonder, and disorientation form his turbulent headspace, and we are made to live them all. It is love, however, the primal one shared only between mother and child, that is the inviolable bond that pushes Room outward. Never taken on maudlin terms, Larson and Tremblay make their love felt on a molecular level, capturing the potent mix of biological dependency and fierce, unshakable devotion that tethers them together. In the process, the film's dramatic circumstances and blossoming aftermath magnify steps we all take in our early development as our widening perception of the world begins to redefine and supplant the reality we thought we knew. It's easy to imagine the film bogged down by manipulative tactics in other hands, but this Room fully earns the flood of emotions it elicits.

9. Mistress America / Noah Baumbach

What a terrific year for Noah Baumbach. Not only did he direct While We're Young, a hilarious and perceptive exploration of authenticity and cultural appropriation across the generations, he also made the scintillatingly witty, bracing, and poignant screwball farce Mistress America, which matches rapid-fire bon mots with equally piercing inquiries into identity, integrity, ambition, and being a young adult in the 21st century. And is there a better cinematic portraitist of urban, middle-class 21st century American identity than Baumbach? There's certainly not a funnier or more incisive one: Mistress America, in its blistering register, cannily digs beneath the very Internet-era-specific layers of performance and irony that comprise the profiles of millenials, finding confusion and doubt as familiar cornerstones and turning the awkward search for self-actualization into a blithe comedy of manners. The line is always deliberately thin between mocking, arch observation and empathetic understanding, but there is never the sense that Baumbach, or inexhaustible co-writer Gerwig, regard these fledgling characters with anything but compassion. That they are able to so adeptly tease out their anxieties with such lightness and elan is beguiling – an ability to encapsulate a particular Gen Y condition unmatched in contemporary film. 

8. Son of Saul / László Nemes

Son of Saul, in form and function, concerns itself with nothing less than the burden of representing the Holocaust on screen. It presupposes we’re familiar with its history and its manifold, often graphic cinematic depictions, which allows it to take on a new perspective that, even more than presenting another side of the 20th century’s most unconscionable atrocity, actively questions the ethics and limits of its visual recreation and the roles image-makers and consumers play in approaching its memory. Locking his camera in almost unwavering close-up on his protagonist while obscuring the violence taking place around him, Nemes does this by locating his theme as vision itself: the burden of the knowledge it generates, and the extent to which we can see, or should see, such horror. The film’s claustrophobic frames and deliberate optical obfuscation also have a more immediately psychological effect, disabling the spectator’s gaze and denying him the sense of omniscience and control he is accustomed to when watching a movie. This all constitutes a hugely daring and maybe even presumptuous conceptual gambit, and Son of Saul is always running the risk of being too much of a stunt, or being unduly abstract. Yet its scrupulous constriction of vision is in the service of an intensely human story. Laser-focused on the face of a victim trying to do one decent thing in a sea of depravity, it wrests visual power from evil, elevating his experience amid abject horror while calling valuable, thought-provoking attention to the politics of one of cinema’s most morally hazardous subjects.

7. The Forbidden Room / Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson

In a movie year defined by updating, repackaging, rehashing, and remixing older films, Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson's manic movie-devouring fantasia represents the creative apex of what contemporary filmmakers can do with the ghosts of cinema's past. Painstakingly replicating the looks, styles, and moods of early moving image art, the film is on the surface a nostalgic mash-up of silent and early sound film idioms, replete with intertitles, rear-screen projection, superimpositions, and color-tinting. And yet at the same time, the cinema it evokes never looked or behaved quite like this, and couldn't have had without the aid of computers. With distressed images that literally morph, bubble, melt, and oscillate across the surface of the frame, not to mention a nesting doll narrative that shuttles us from a tutorial on how to take a bath to genre-influenced episodes about vampire bananas, sentient mustaches, and dierrere fixations, The Forbidden Room is an explicitly postmodern simulation, returning us to an experience of film at its most primal by way of 21st century technology and culture. Propelled by absurdist logic and a liberal confounding of spatiotemporal coordinates, it epitomizes film as an analog of dream all the same. If this sounds like esoteric cinephile territory, it is, but it's also approachably playful, imaginative, invigorating, and funny, a boundary-collapsing work of art that melds the tools and sensibilities of modern production with the infinitely elastic potentials the cinema brought with it at its birth.

6. Creed / Ryan Coogler

If The Forbidden Room was the year's innovative statement on the possibilities of making the old radically new, Creed was the film that best exemplified, in a classical narrative mode, how to maintain a legacy while reenergizing it with a wholly modern ethos. It starts with Ryan Coogler: from the first frame, the young, preternaturally gifted director commands every element on and off screen with astonishing dexterity, punching up the original Rocky formula with new levels of sensitivity, pathos, cultural detail, and visual flair that put nearly every 2015 Hollywood release to shame. The brio he brings to the table never falters, evinced in boldly dynamic sequences (that one-take boxing match is gobsmacking) and quieter emotional moments that honor real personal struggles. His conviction extends to every other person involved in the movie, all vigorously committed to material that never needed to be this good. That passion finds its concentrated center in Michael B. Jordan, who makes Creed a winning, flesh-and-blood individual we become intimately invested in. Jordan pairs so naturally with the aged Stallone – whose rugged, rueful Rocky parallels and deepens the former's efforts to extricate himself from, and finally embrace, past legacies – that what any other director might have made a rote franchise baton-pass becomes something far richer and more resonant through their interaction. It's an achievement in itself that Creed nails the combination of heart and grit that made the first Rocky special; it's an even greater one that it emboldens its image with a social consciousness that valorizes the look – and voice – of a new generation.

5. Inside Out / Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen

Many films have portrayed the messy, painful, finally inevitable process of growing up (there's even another on my list!), but it's fair to say that none have conceived it like Inside Out. Pixar's film, directed by Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen, is the studio's most cerebral and ingenious idea yet, visualizing a child's transition into adolescence by literally placing us in her head. Here, cognitive functions are vibrantly and cleverly reified, bringing legibility to the mental processes that guide us through life and making knotty psychological concepts fully graspable. In the way it confronts us with our emotions by literally showing us our emotions, the film, skirting oversimplification, manages to be an extraordinary lesson in how art can help us make sense of ourselves. Inside Out certainly proves an edifying tool, and not just for children: its exploration of how identity and emotional constitution evolve as we accumulate experience; its empathic conveyance of how, and why, melancholy and nostalgia become inseparable from joy; its deft internal/external visualization of the dialog between experience and memory; its heartrending yet never mushy fostering of emotional openness - all of this becomes a template for a new awareness. That swell of emotion we feel during the film's climax doesn't arise superficially, but because we have caught something of our human condition that we have always felt but have never seen reflected with such clarity.

4. Cemetery of Splendor / Apichatpong Weerasethakul

You don’t so much watch an Apichatpong Weerasethakul movie as become biologically entrained to it. As his languorous pacing moves us through a procession of placid images, we feel ourselves becoming suspended between states of consciousness. One could locate the position, perhaps rightfully, as somewhere between wake and sleep, and this is certainly the condition that Cemetery of Splendor literally points to in its story of comatose soldiers and their caretakers who drift imperceptibly in and out of lucidity. But Apichatpong’s cinema goes even further, positing itself as not something so typical as a reflection of an unconscious state, but as another mode of consciousness altogether. In Cemetery of Splendor, this alternative consciousness has meditative but also political dimensions: in the military-governed Thailand that the film presents, it has the power to free the individual from external structures that suppress. The cinema’s liberating, healing capacities are demonstrated in Apichatpong’s centerpiece sequence, which begins with our protagonists in a theater watching schlocky, state-sanctioned Thai movies and ends in a becalmed room of sleeping soldiers, neon tubes installed in the latter space filling the frame with a hypnotizing cycle of colors. All boundaries – between forms of perception, past and present, modernity and tradition – dissolve in Apichatpong’s cinema as the temporal and the otherworldly constantly, hushedly intermingle. Cemetery of Splendor distills this in his most emotionally accessible way yet, and the result feels nothing short of soul-enriching.

3. Ex Machina / Alex Garland

Ex Machina was the first film from 2015 I saw, and its seductive, sleekly disquieting surfaces have never left me, nor, certainly, have its haunting ruminations on the nature of reality and power in the digital era. A chamber piece, Alex Garland’s modestly scaled setup is ideally calibrated for a sci-fi exercise equal parts suspenseful and philosophical, in which dread is fomented by stimulating conversation and genre thrills naturally accrue from character interaction. Its space is relatively small and its players are few, but its ideas are big: confidently initiating and juggling dialogues on gender politics, subject/object positions, surveillance, social conditioning, and the increasingly nebulous lines between reality and simulation, human and machine, Garland and his pitch-perfect four-person cast play out a veritable buffet of 21st century anxieties to their seemingly natural ends. This is the rare piece of speculative science fiction cinema that actually feels completely, scarily plausible, extrapolating from our current technological moment to a future that is, in so many ways, already here, populated by hubristic tech wizards and characterized by apprehension over what, exactly, it is they're creating – and we're using. By its last scene, a contemporary allegory of the cave in reverse, Ex Machina puts into sharp relief a world and a society that have always been constructed. The stinger is that, one day, its continued construction may be out of our arrogant human reach.

2. Carol / Todd Haynes

More than an achingly wistful portrait of forbidden desire, Carol is a deeply romantic exaltation of the power of the gaze to cut through even the most rigidly orthodox of social constraints. That gaze, in Todd Haynes’s exquisitely wrought story, is an entirely female one and a resolutely queer one. Not only does it reject the male-ordered dictates imposed on life and love, it moves like a heat-seeking missile beneath a calcified system of heterosexual looking, a tacit recognition between gay individuals who know how to find each other’s eyes while subverting everyone else’s. Among the many aspects of this uniquely sublimated and coded gaze that Carol illuminates is its resilient agency: in an expressively smoggy, tea-stained, and drably proper 1950s New York City, Haynes activates and then empowers the desire of two women for each other, making their glances autonomous from conventions and into the strongest bond in a relationship that doesn’t want for physical ardor. Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara realize this relationship as a thrillingly complex romance that’s also mutually emboldening guidance for two LGBT people at very different points in their lives. They may be constantly isolated behind obscuring glass or confined in the narrowly segmented spaces of Edward Lachman’s dreamy-dreary frames, but they know where to look, and Haynes lets them do so in one of the most stirring and sanguine films ever made about the optics of queer desire.

1. Spotlight / Tom McCarthy 

As I noted at the very start, for me, no film in 2015 made its case as any kind of definitive "best." Read this #1 placement as belonging to Carol, or Ex Machina, or Cemetery of Splendor, or any of the others and it would be equally true to my feelings. But I like lists and their neatness, so I went with a typical ranking for the sake of tradition. Something had to be on top.

So why Spotlight? In many ways, choosing such a relatively conventional film seems incongruous in the scheme of my other favorites, many of which are on the more adventurous side. Yet to label Spotlight as "conventional" is to be terribly reductive: it would minimize its masterly self-effacement, ignore its consummate craft, and worst of all, treat narrative American filmmaking this humbly assured, measured, and unshowy as if it were a common thing. It's not. McCarthy's film, which tackles the incendiary subject matter of abuse within the Catholic Church and the journalists who dug deep to expose it, actually avoids convention in how tenaciously it steers clear of the usual dramatic Hollywood hallmarks, eschewing sensationalism, grandstanding, histrionics, and facile hero/villain, innocent/corrupt dichotomies at every turn. Also rare? Its focus on the process of doing work, unglamorously and in detail. Its unforced naturalism, exhibited by every cast member in an unerring ensemble, the most well-oiled of the year. The understatement and sincerity with which it approaches every investigation, testimony, negotiation, and incrimination, keeping its characters imperfect, never ironing out the complicated ethical knots and unavoidable compromises they must deal with along the way.

That's a lot of "un-" words. I haven't even mentioned how sharply designed McCarthy's film is visually (despite what you may have heard), how its use of line and pattern not only engender a graphic dynamism that creates a sense of tireless movement and routine, but reinforces the rigid institutional control that permeates the film. Above all, Spotlight stays in the memory because of the humanity it fights for in the face of systemic injustice, doing so with outrage but also uncommon sobriety. It may rein in the big emotions on screen, but the feelings it summons in the viewer are considerable.

And the very closest runners-up:

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, George Miller's indelibly envisioned action blockbuster, which manages to be an exhilarating piece of maximalism and a rousing plea for individuality against the debasing forces of dominant power structures.

THE END OF THE TOUR, James Ponsoldt's exceedingly smart two-hander that recounts the 1996 interview Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky conducted with famed, troubled author David Foster Wallace. A textbook conversation on artistic neuroses, self-concept, consumer culture, depression, and the nature of genius, with career-best performances from Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg.

45 YEARS, Andrew Haigh's delicate, devastating marital drama with the unimpeachable Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, who must deal, in their own telling ways, with the fallout of a revelation that may redefine their relationship forever.

Finally: I don't consider the following films 2015 releases like most critics do (they all premiered in significant places in 2014), but they're brilliant. So watch them.

JAUJA, Lisandro Alonso's tantalizingly enigmatic brain-teaser, a film about people and empires in search of absent objects, dead ends, and unobtainable destinies. A postcolonial allegory that's always just out of your grasp. This would be on my list if I considered it 2015.

THE LOOK OF SILENCE, Joshua Oppenheimer's beyond intrepid documentary, his follow-up to the brilliant The Act of Killing, is nominated for an Oscar this year. It's an equally valuable witnessing, and unraveling of, a country's flabbergasting distortion of its genocidal history, told from the perspective of a victim's brother who refuses to let the past be erased.

A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE, the final film in Roy Andersson's trilogy of "what it means to be a human being" keeps the deadpan, sardonic, and surreal, adds tenderness and maybe - grace?